Through a caravan, darkly

In its journey to the sites of lynchings across states, the Karwan-e-Mohabbat found a stark waning of compassion and solidarity

In its journey to the sites of lynchings across states, the
Karwan-e-Mohabbat found a stark waning of compassion and solidarity
(Illustration: C R Sasikumar)
The harrowing journey of our caravan of love laid bare a country both
divided and devoid of compassion. People are compelled to live with
fear and hate, and a hostile state, as normalised elements of everyday
living. An old farmer in Uttar Pradesh lost his son transporting cattle
to a lynch mob. The police did not register this as a lynch killing, the
killers are untraced, and he has not even seen his son’s post-mortem
report. He said to us, his face lined with sorrow, “Maine sabar kar liya.” I have learned to endure.
Attempting love, atonement, conscience and justice, the
Karwan-e-Mohabbat travelled through India from east to west, traversing
Assam, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Delhi, Western Uttar Pradesh, Haryana,
Rajasthan and Gujarat. The landscape changed — paddy fields, areca nut
groves, sugarcane fields, millet farms, arid wastelands. But the stories
we heard in state after state were frighteningly similar.
We found widows, mothers, fathers and children, numbed with
incomprehension at the ferocity of loathing and violence that had
snatched from them their loved ones. How could parents of two boys in
Nagaon, Assam come to terms with the lynching of their sons by a mob
from their neighbouring village, accusing them of being cow thieves? Why
would they gouge their eyes out and cut off their ears? Why would
complete strangers stab Harish Pujari 14 times near Mangalore, pulling
out his intestines, only because they mistook him for a Muslim when he
was riding pillion behind his Muslim friend?
Dalits are viciously attacked by upper caste neighbours to crush any
assertion. Single women remain vulnerable to incredible medieval cruelty
by family and neighbours, branded as witches. Christians in tribal
regions are subjugated by violence targeting their priests, nuns and
places of worship, and by laws criminalising religious conversions. But
the foremost targets of hate violence by lynching and police killings
are Muslims, and it is they who have most abandoned hope.
Against Muslims, the hate weapon of choice is public lynching. We
read of lynching of Blacks in America as public spectacles, watched by
white families in picnics. In today’s India, this same objective of
lynching as public performance is accomplished with the video camera.
Most lynch attacks are filmed by the attackers, with images of their
victims — humiliated, cringing, begging for their lives. In a
particularly horrifying incident in Jharkhand, in a busy market square
in Ramgarh, a mob stops the car of a Muslim man. A huge pile of red meat
— the size of the body of a full cow — appears on the street, the mob
claiming that they “seized” this from the car. He is filmed as they beat
him to death. Laughing faces of attackers appear in the video. They
upload the videos even as they lynch the man and torch his car. His
young son receives the video of his father being lynched on his mobile
even as the lynching is underway.
We found that lynch videos are widely and avidly shared among young
Hindutva activists. As evidence of what they see as their valorous
exploits. As proof that the state will protect them. As public
exhibitions of the humiliation of their enemy communities. And for
drafting new recruits to militant Hindu supremacist formations like the
Hindu Yuva Vahini founded by the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh Yogi
Adityanath.
We found families that were bereaved by hate violence bereft of hope
of either protection or justice from the state. The police in almost all
the 50 families we met during our travels in eight states registered
criminal charges against the victims, and treated the accused with kid
gloves, not opposing their bail. A lynch mob, for instance, attacks a
vehicle transporting cattle, killing some of the transporters. The
police registers criminal cases of illegal cow smuggling, animal cruelty
and rash driving against the victims. It obliterates completely the
fact that the men were lynched. Or, in other cases, it mentions
anonymous mobs who are never caught. The families of people attacked by
lynch mobs sometimes do not even file a complaint with to the police,
because far from getting justice, the police would register criminal
charges against them.
Even more worrying, we found that in Haryana for the past two years,
and in Western Uttar Pradesh since Adityanath became chief minister, the
police has allegedly taken on the work of the lynch mob. And unlike
lynching, targeted police killings have barely registered in the
national conscience.
Dalits’ homes were gutted and women and men attacked by their Rajput
neighbours in Shabirpur of Saharanpur district, only because they had
the temerity to plan the installing of a five-foot statue of Ambedkar on
their own community land. They could not accept that the statue on a
raised platform would display Ambedkar pointing his finger at the public
street on which they walked. In Dangawas in Rajasthan, six men were
crushed under tractors because they dared to demand their land back
after their claims had been validated by every court. In Anand district
in Gujarat, the only crime of a Dalit youth was to seek a dry portion of
the village commons that was not a swamp to skin a cow.
But hearteningly, we found that the Dalits in all three states were
angry, proud, organised and fiercely determined to fight back. In
Shabbirpur, the Dalits have converted en masse to Buddhism, immersing
their Hindu idols in the village ponds. Jai Bhim was their resounding
slogan everywhere.
This was in stark contrast to the Muslims, who are today crushed,
isolated and despairing. And we found in all these local communities
profound and pervasive failures of compassion. We encountered very
little acknowledgment, regret or remorse among the upper-caste Hindu
communities in any of the states we travelled. They remain convinced
that somehow their Muslim and Dalit neighbours deserved their cruel
deaths to lynch mobs or police bullets.
There is a gathering darkness in our land, less and less penetrated
by the light of compassion and solidarity. As India is fast mutating
into a republic of hate, why do we just watch from the sidelines?
In Nuh in Haryana, a young Muslim man said, “A poisonous wind is
blowing through our country. I feel a stranger in my own homeland.”

Map of L K Advani's Rath Yatra of 1990

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